Maarten Derksen
Biographic Data
| ID | 91970 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maarten Derksen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maarten |
| FAMILY NAME | Derksen |
| SIGNATURE | DERKSEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1572-4709 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Pain of Replication: Emotional Concerns about Fidelity in a Replication Study
The replication crisis has led to more focus on methodology in psychological research. Meta-researchers urged for more direct replications, larger sample sizes, and preregistration of research plans. In this paper we point to two other aspects of research: the ontology of the research phenomenon and the emotions that are part of scientific work. We present an ethnographic case study of a replication in psychology and argue that these three aspect…
One profile, five stories an autoethnography of sense-making and meaning-making of a personality profile
Purpose Senior professionals and managers employed by large organizations regularly participate in leadership development interventions that include a personality inventory. This research paper aims to address how the first author and five feedback coaches make sense and meaning of the results of these inventories and interpret this process in terms of Perceptual Control Theory. Design/methodology/approach The first author engaged in five separat…
Person with autism’ or ‘autistic person’? A human engineering lens on science communication
Replication after Collins: An ethnography of current replication studies in psychology
Ethnography and other empirical studies of replication played a significant role in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) during the 1970s and 1980s. Collins and other proponents of SSK highlighted that exact replication was impossible, knowledge was often tacit and hard to explicate, and that results were always socially negotiated. We revisit these observations and compare them with our ethnography of current replication practices in psyc…
Replications are informative, particularly when they fail
Our comment on Archer’s enticing article focuses on his extension of Bhaskar’s philosophy to psychology, and on direct replication, which the author says is of very limited use in psychology. We only deal with critical realism indirectly. Our arguments boil down to two points: experiments can usefully be seen as performative (and the same goes for research in general), and replication is not problematic in psychology because of the variability of…
The methods and principles of the natural sciences are not a diet we need to follow: A close look at the terms of the question
In this article, I discuss each of the elements of this special issue’s question, that is, “should,” “psychology,” “follow,” “the methods and principles,” and “the natural sciences,” and first argue that the natural sciences are many and diverse, and the choice to emulate them would still leave plenty of room for variety. There are, moreover, good ontological reasons to resist the urge to restrict what we call “psychology” to the study of human l…
Kinds of Replication: Examining the Meanings of “Conceptual Replication” and “Direct Replication”
Although psychology’s recent crisis has been attributed to various scientific practices, it has come to be called a “replication crisis,” prompting extensive appraisals of this putatively crucial scientific practice. These have yielded disagreements over what kind of replication is to be preferred and what phenomena are being explored, yet the proposals are all grounded in a conventional philosophy of science. This article proposes another avenue…
Putting Popper to work
In response to what are seen as fundamental problems in Psychology, a reform movement has emerged that finds inspiration in philosophy of science, the work of Karl Popper in particular. The reformers attempt to put Popper into practice and create a discipline based on the principles of critical rationalism. In this article I describe the concrete sociotechnical practices by which the reformers attempt to realise their ideals, and I argue that the…
Ecologies of Deception in Psychology and Rhetoric
This article explores deception through the lenses of rhetorical theory and experimental social psychology, thus performing an important interdisciplinary gesture. It argues that deception is emergent in experimental conditions as it likewise is in rhetorical encounters. In so doing, it builds toward an understanding of human agency outside the bounds of the subject/object split. Examining work on rhetorical ecologies and ambience on the one hand…
Different spaces: Exploring Facebook as heterotopia
In this paper we explore the space of Facebook, and use Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to describe it. We show that the heterotopic nature of Facebook explains not only much of its attraction, but even more the discomfort that many people, users as well as non–users, experience in it. Analysing Facebook as a heterotopia brings its relation to other spaces into focus: it is a world in the world, that juxtaposes and merges other spaces in…
"Turning Men into Machines? Scientific Management, Industrial Psychology, and the "Human Factor
In the controversy that broke out in 1911 over Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management, many critics contended that it ignored "the human factor" and reduced workers to machines. Psychologists succeeded in positioning themselves as experts of the human factor, and their instruments and expertise as the necessary complement of Taylor's psychologically deficient system. However, the conventional view that the increasing influence of psychologis…
The history of ‘Social Technology’, 1898–1930
Since the term was first coined, in the late nineteenth century, ‘social technology’ has had a mixed fate. Whereas ‘technology’ has become one of the keywords of the twentieth century, ‘social technology’ never quite seemed to settle in the vocabulary of social theory. In this article, we focus on the early history of ‘social technology’, tracing its spread from its origin in the sociology department at the University of Chicago, and describing t…
Social technologies: Cross-disciplinary reflections on technologies in and from the social sciences
In this introduction, we explore the relevance to critical psychology of the ideas about technology that have come from science and technology studies (STS), which we argue allow a new look at a classic theme in critical approaches in psychology. Rather than seeing psychical and social reality as objective realities, critical psychologists have approached them as the products of historically situated practices, intimately tied up with the circums…
Control and resistance in the psychology of lying
Psychology’s obsession with control, with manipulating the experimental situation and the behavior of participants, has often been criticized. Mainstream, experimental psychology, it is said, abuses its power in the laboratory to artificially create docile participants who fit its experimental regime. I argue that this criticism accords too much control to the experimenter. Using the psychology of lying and lie detection as an example, I show tha…
Social Technology
The brain as an instrument: Comment on Gergen’s “The acculturated brain”
In “The acculturated brain,” his critical analysis of the current brain hype, Kenneth Gergen concludes that we should consider the brain primarily as an instrument for achieving culturally constructed ends, and challenge the determining power of the brain with the question “Could I do otherwise?” In my reply, I point out that the pressing issue is usually “How could I do otherwise?,” not sorting out determined behavior from culturally constructed…
Realism, Relativism, and Evolutionary Psychology
Against recent attempts to forge a reconciliation between constructionism and realism, I contend that, in psychology at least, stirring up conflict is a more fruitful strategy. To illustrate this thesis, I confront a school of psychology with strong realist leanings, evolutionary psychology, with the relativist critique of realism proposed by Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter. I show that evolutionary psychology employs the kind of “bottomline argumen…
People as Scientific Instruments
People are common instruments in the social sciences. They may act as experimenter, receiving and instructing the participants; they may be a stooge, a confederate of the experimenter who is part of the experimental manipulation; they may function as raters of their own personality or that of others; or they may conduct interviews and do observations. In most social scientific research, people are necessary to elicit, record, or measure the pheno…
Perspectives on de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
Anti Anti-dualism: A Reply to Goertzen
In contrast to Goertzen, I do not think that the fragmentation of psychology and the social sciences is a problem that requires a principled solution. When researchers find opportunities to collaborate, they should be supported, but there is no compelling reason to adopt one overall model of integration. The philosophical issue usually put forward as the root cause of fragmentation—Cartesian dualism—is a red herring: a pragmatic pluralism of appr…
Against Integration: Why Evolution Cannot Unify the Social Sciences
A lack of integration is often identified as a fundamental problem in psychology and the social sciences. It is thought that only through increased cooperation among the various disciplines and sub-disciplines, and integration of their different theoretical approaches, can psychology and the social sciences make real progress. An increasing number of psychologists have recently been proposing that the theory of evolution must be accepted as the f…
Discipline, subjectivity and personality: An analysis of the manuals of four psychological tests
The administration of psychological tests is highly regulated. Test manuals prescribe the instructions to the test subject, the time the test should take, where it should take place, whether and how the test administrator should answer questions from the test subject, and other aspects of the testing situation. Through the manual, the behaviour of test administrator and test subject is disciplined so that the subject may become measurable. The ma…
Are We not Experimenting then: The Rhetorical Demarcation of Psychology and Common Sense
Scientific disciplines need both autonomy and alliances with other cultural groups. In order to achieve these twin goals, scientists have to engage in boundary rhetoric and popularize the demarcation of their discipline. In the case of psychology in particular such rhetoric involves a paradoxical role for common sense as rhetorical commonplace, counterpart of psychology and object of study. The boundary rhetoric of two leading figures from the hi…
"Turning Men into Machines? Scientific Management, Industrial Psychology, and the "Human Factor
In the controversy that broke out in 1911 over Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management, many critics contended that it ignored "the human factor" and reduced workers to machines. Psychologists succeeded in positioning themselves as experts of the human factor, and their instruments and expertise as the necessary complement of Taylor's psychologically deficient system. However, the conventional view that the increasing influence of psychologis…
Discipline, subjectivity and personality: An analysis of the manuals of four psychological tests
The administration of psychological tests is highly regulated. Test manuals prescribe the instructions to the test subject, the time the test should take, where it should take place, whether and how the test administrator should answer questions from the test subject, and other aspects of the testing situation. Through the manual, the behaviour of test administrator and test subject is disciplined so that the subject may become measurable. The ma…
Ecologies of Deception in Psychology and Rhetoric
This article explores deception through the lenses of rhetorical theory and experimental social psychology, thus performing an important interdisciplinary gesture. It argues that deception is emergent in experimental conditions as it likewise is in rhetorical encounters. In so doing, it builds toward an understanding of human agency outside the bounds of the subject/object split. Examining work on rhetorical ecologies and ambience on the one hand…
Are We not Experimenting then: The Rhetorical Demarcation of Psychology and Common Sense
Scientific disciplines need both autonomy and alliances with other cultural groups. In order to achieve these twin goals, scientists have to engage in boundary rhetoric and popularize the demarcation of their discipline. In the case of psychology in particular such rhetoric involves a paradoxical role for common sense as rhetorical commonplace, counterpart of psychology and object of study. The boundary rhetoric of two leading figures from the hi…
Discipline, subjectivity and personality: An analysis of the manuals of four psychological tests
The administration of psychological tests is highly regulated. Test manuals prescribe the instructions to the test subject, the time the test should take, where it should take place, whether and how the test administrator should answer questions from the test subject, and other aspects of the testing situation. Through the manual, the behaviour of test administrator and test subject is disciplined so that the subject may become measurable. The ma…
Against Integration: Why Evolution Cannot Unify the Social Sciences
A lack of integration is often identified as a fundamental problem in psychology and the social sciences. It is thought that only through increased cooperation among the various disciplines and sub-disciplines, and integration of their different theoretical approaches, can psychology and the social sciences make real progress. An increasing number of psychologists have recently been proposing that the theory of evolution must be accepted as the f…
Anti Anti-dualism: A Reply to Goertzen
In contrast to Goertzen, I do not think that the fragmentation of psychology and the social sciences is a problem that requires a principled solution. When researchers find opportunities to collaborate, they should be supported, but there is no compelling reason to adopt one overall model of integration. The philosophical issue usually put forward as the root cause of fragmentation—Cartesian dualism—is a red herring: a pragmatic pluralism of appr…
Perspectives on de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
Realism, Relativism, and Evolutionary Psychology
Against recent attempts to forge a reconciliation between constructionism and realism, I contend that, in psychology at least, stirring up conflict is a more fruitful strategy. To illustrate this thesis, I confront a school of psychology with strong realist leanings, evolutionary psychology, with the relativist critique of realism proposed by Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter. I show that evolutionary psychology employs the kind of “bottomline argumen…
People as Scientific Instruments
People are common instruments in the social sciences. They may act as experimenter, receiving and instructing the participants; they may be a stooge, a confederate of the experimenter who is part of the experimental manipulation; they may function as raters of their own personality or that of others; or they may conduct interviews and do observations. In most social scientific research, people are necessary to elicit, record, or measure the pheno…
Social Technology
The brain as an instrument: Comment on Gergen’s “The acculturated brain”
In “The acculturated brain,” his critical analysis of the current brain hype, Kenneth Gergen concludes that we should consider the brain primarily as an instrument for achieving culturally constructed ends, and challenge the determining power of the brain with the question “Could I do otherwise?” In my reply, I point out that the pressing issue is usually “How could I do otherwise?,” not sorting out determined behavior from culturally constructed…
Social technologies: Cross-disciplinary reflections on technologies in and from the social sciences
In this introduction, we explore the relevance to critical psychology of the ideas about technology that have come from science and technology studies (STS), which we argue allow a new look at a classic theme in critical approaches in psychology. Rather than seeing psychical and social reality as objective realities, critical psychologists have approached them as the products of historically situated practices, intimately tied up with the circums…
Control and resistance in the psychology of lying
Psychology’s obsession with control, with manipulating the experimental situation and the behavior of participants, has often been criticized. Mainstream, experimental psychology, it is said, abuses its power in the laboratory to artificially create docile participants who fit its experimental regime. I argue that this criticism accords too much control to the experimenter. Using the psychology of lying and lie detection as an example, I show tha…
The history of ‘Social Technology’, 1898–1930
Since the term was first coined, in the late nineteenth century, ‘social technology’ has had a mixed fate. Whereas ‘technology’ has become one of the keywords of the twentieth century, ‘social technology’ never quite seemed to settle in the vocabulary of social theory. In this article, we focus on the early history of ‘social technology’, tracing its spread from its origin in the sociology department at the University of Chicago, and describing t…
Different spaces: Exploring Facebook as heterotopia
In this paper we explore the space of Facebook, and use Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to describe it. We show that the heterotopic nature of Facebook explains not only much of its attraction, but even more the discomfort that many people, users as well as non–users, experience in it. Analysing Facebook as a heterotopia brings its relation to other spaces into focus: it is a world in the world, that juxtaposes and merges other spaces in…
"Turning Men into Machines? Scientific Management, Industrial Psychology, and the "Human Factor
In the controversy that broke out in 1911 over Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management, many critics contended that it ignored "the human factor" and reduced workers to machines. Psychologists succeeded in positioning themselves as experts of the human factor, and their instruments and expertise as the necessary complement of Taylor's psychologically deficient system. However, the conventional view that the increasing influence of psychologis…
Ecologies of Deception in Psychology and Rhetoric
This article explores deception through the lenses of rhetorical theory and experimental social psychology, thus performing an important interdisciplinary gesture. It argues that deception is emergent in experimental conditions as it likewise is in rhetorical encounters. In so doing, it builds toward an understanding of human agency outside the bounds of the subject/object split. Examining work on rhetorical ecologies and ambience on the one hand…
Putting Popper to work
In response to what are seen as fundamental problems in Psychology, a reform movement has emerged that finds inspiration in philosophy of science, the work of Karl Popper in particular. The reformers attempt to put Popper into practice and create a discipline based on the principles of critical rationalism. In this article I describe the concrete sociotechnical practices by which the reformers attempt to realise their ideals, and I argue that the…
Kinds of Replication: Examining the Meanings of “Conceptual Replication” and “Direct Replication”
Although psychology’s recent crisis has been attributed to various scientific practices, it has come to be called a “replication crisis,” prompting extensive appraisals of this putatively crucial scientific practice. These have yielded disagreements over what kind of replication is to be preferred and what phenomena are being explored, yet the proposals are all grounded in a conventional philosophy of science. This article proposes another avenue…
Replications are informative, particularly when they fail
Our comment on Archer’s enticing article focuses on his extension of Bhaskar’s philosophy to psychology, and on direct replication, which the author says is of very limited use in psychology. We only deal with critical realism indirectly. Our arguments boil down to two points: experiments can usefully be seen as performative (and the same goes for research in general), and replication is not problematic in psychology because of the variability of…
The methods and principles of the natural sciences are not a diet we need to follow: A close look at the terms of the question
In this article, I discuss each of the elements of this special issue’s question, that is, “should,” “psychology,” “follow,” “the methods and principles,” and “the natural sciences,” and first argue that the natural sciences are many and diverse, and the choice to emulate them would still leave plenty of room for variety. There are, moreover, good ontological reasons to resist the urge to restrict what we call “psychology” to the study of human l…
One profile, five stories an autoethnography of sense-making and meaning-making of a personality profile
Purpose Senior professionals and managers employed by large organizations regularly participate in leadership development interventions that include a personality inventory. This research paper aims to address how the first author and five feedback coaches make sense and meaning of the results of these inventories and interpret this process in terms of Perceptual Control Theory. Design/methodology/approach The first author engaged in five separat…
Person with autism’ or ‘autistic person’? A human engineering lens on science communication
Replication after Collins: An ethnography of current replication studies in psychology
Ethnography and other empirical studies of replication played a significant role in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) during the 1970s and 1980s. Collins and other proponents of SSK highlighted that exact replication was impossible, knowledge was often tacit and hard to explicate, and that results were always socially negotiated. We revisit these observations and compare them with our ethnography of current replication practices in psyc…
The Pain of Replication: Emotional Concerns about Fidelity in a Replication Study
The replication crisis has led to more focus on methodology in psychological research. Meta-researchers urged for more direct replications, larger sample sizes, and preregistration of research plans. In this paper we point to two other aspects of research: the ontology of the research phenomenon and the emotions that are part of scientific work. We present an ethnographic case study of a replication in psychology and argue that these three aspect…
Sociology (17 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (9 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Social Representations and Identity (6 works)